Monday, October 13, 2008

Altdorf did not fall OMG

The big news around the interwebs is that Altdorf has fallen on the Volkmar server. The sky is falling, the game is over, OMG. Even Tobold has succumbed to the hysteria.

Except it didn't happen. Destruction forces on Averheim simply GOT INTO Altdorf. They got in early in the morning when few Order were on, spent a few hours ripping shit, and then got repelled by the people who had logged on in the meantime. They didn't make it to the Emperor, much less kill him.

But the story you can piece together from various forum posts, if you don't actually read the whole thread? Oh, that's much worse. To hear these people tell it, 500 Destruction logged on at 5 AM when literally zero Order were around, ninja'd every T4 zone and the fortress, snuck into Altdorf like thieves, and capped the city completely at 7 AM.

If people are going to whine this much every time a city goes contested, they're going to be whining a lot. I suppose that's to be expected. But we need to establish some sort of reasonable lexicon here. When people say "Altdorf was taken", I need to know what they mean. Did they mean it went contested? Or that they achieved some minimum level of success in the Capital PQs and scenarios? Or that the King fell? If I don't know what we mean by these statements then they just become sensationalist blogger posts.

4 comments:

With all due respect, if you are gona quote the story, please quote it right :)

250 (give or take 30 depending on the time) logged in from the Retribution alliance at 7am sunday.. .spent the next 4 hours locking down T2, T3 and T4, as well as the two fortresses, and around noon EST attacked Altdorf. The first stage, stage one, where you fight in PQs with order people fighting back we barely won, unlocking stage 2. At stage 2 order is evicted from the city and we now control it. We have one hour to clear both the Temple and College, to unlock Franz, before we are evicted. We cleared temple, but the Bright Wizard Lord and his heros were too much for our under geared 40's and we could take the heat, so to speak, and were kicked out of the city when time ran out for stage 2.

However, my own confusion as to the details further shows the need for a common vocabulary here. Personally, would you consider what happened to be "Altdorf fell"? Is pushing Order out the criteria there?

I think a lot of confusion stems from a disconnect between the actual game mechanics, and 'own terminology.

When the city is contested, its just alike any other contested zone map, with the yellow icon, and is open to both factions. When moved on to stage 2, it is classified as "Destruction controlled" and flagged as "captured" on the map. This meant order was evicted, and unable to enter at all. This, by common acceptance, would be considered "captured" by most people. Had stage two been completed, and then stage three been done as well (killing the Emperor) then the city would have been locked for 12-20 hours or so and fully ours. This would have been a "true" capture in the sense. So I guess the real problem is there are two levels to a captured city, the initial but short lived captured, and then the full all out "sacked" state.

In my opinion Altdorf was indeed captured, as the only thing left in Destructions way was a string of increasingly hard one-sided PQs, order no longer had a chance to defend it. However I don't consider it a "complete" capture in that it was not then locked down fort he remainder of the day. Some might say we sacked it, but didn't capture it, others like to say we captured it but didn't sack it. I think mythic needs to put together a better string of terms for the stages.